HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-03-01T15:31:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin
items: "It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
items: Why Rome fell
items: 10 children and 12,000 pieces of art: the remarkable life of Lady Charlotte Schreiber
items: How to be a Victorian
items: Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s
items: London 1908 was the weirdest Winter Olympics in history – and here's why
items: The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe
items: Who is the most overrated person in history? 9 experts reveal their choices
items: The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy

I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin
type: item
date: 2026-03-01T15:30:45.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Communism
subject: Historical people
subject: Second World War battles
description: There aren’t many theme parks that place statues of Soviet leaders next to Snow White and her seven dwarfs, but you’ll find one in southern Lithuania. Keith Lowe takes us on a tour of one of Europe’s most bizarre – and controversial – tourist attractions
encoded: I am standing in a clearing in a Lithuanian forest, surrounded by guard towers and electrified fences. To all intents and purposes, it looks like I’m in a Soviet prison camp. Up above me a loudspeaker barks out orders in Russian. I hurry along a corridor of barbed wire. Up ahead, peeping ominously through the trees, I can see the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun. But all is not as it seems. It doesn’t take long to realise that the loudspeaker is playing some sort of recording on a loop. The guards in the towers are not real either, but poorly disguised mannequins in theatre costume. And who are they guarding? Beneath them, in the barbed wire enclosure, is a row of Communist statues and half a dozen grazing llamas. Further along there are emus, cockatoos, a depressed-looking brown bear, and some statues of mass murderers. As for the gun, when I reach it, I discover that the only thing it is guarding is a children’s playground. Rifles and roundabouts, cockatoos and cattle-trucks, Lenin and llamas: welcome to Grūtas Park, Europe’s weirdest open-air museum. Its combination of terror and kitsch is so controversial that it almost got shut down. I first came here in 2018 as part of my research for a study of Second World War monuments. But I felt compelled to return, because I still can’t quite believe that this place actually exists. A brutal past Grūtas Park has its roots in Lithuania’s very troubled history. Like several of its Baltic neighbours, Lithuania began the 20th century as part of Russia and only gained its independence in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Just over 20 years later, at the beginning of the Second World War, it was invaded by Soviet troops all over again. Then came the Nazis, followed once again by the Soviets three years later – and with each new invasion came new brutality. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/42Y7B3TJ-ac517fe-e1772189389657.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white…

1DSC1437-Lenin-Llamas-05-18c368a-e1772191107175.jpg
width: 1506
height: 1000

"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
type: item
date: 2026-02-25T15:30:07.000Z
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Death
subject: Georgian
subject: Historical events
subject: Murder
subject: Slavery
description: In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
encoded: Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial mac…

GettyImages-640476621webready-0f78e56-e1771950825311.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

Why Rome fell
type: item
date: 2026-02-23T15:30:21.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Historical events
subject: Life in ancient Rome
subject: Roman rulers
description: How do civilisations collapse? That was the question at the heart of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two hundred and fifty years after it was published, Guy de la Bédoyère argues that Gibbon’s magnum opus remains a landmark in the writing of history
encoded: Sometimes, a single narrative comes to dominate how we remember a year. So it is with 1776. This, as every history lover knows, was the date that the American colonies declared their independence, beginning the history of the United States. But back in the old world, another, rather more modest event would have a profound influence on cultural history. For 1776 was also the year that the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in London. And though it may not have spawned a nation, there’s little doubt that the book’s release was a landmark moment in the writing of history. Authored by Edward Gibbon, an essayist and, at this time, Whig MP for Liskeard, this epic work eventually grew to encompass the story of the Roman empire from the accession of the emperor Trajan in AD 98 through to 1453, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and the rump of the Eastern empire fell. The last of its six volumes appeared in 1788 just before another tumultuous year in global history, 1789, when the opening salvos were fired in the French Revolution. What, in the year of its 250th anniversary, are we to make of Decline and Fall? Is it coincidental that a book written at a time of rebellion, and where so much of the narrative is about political intrigues and the loss of power, connected with 18th-century readers? And how did a history based on limited resources that few scholars would refer to today escape its time to become a classic? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-122219029webready-2206e03-e1771851490986.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A life‑sized marble statue of a Roman leader stands upright against a carved stone wall. The figure wears ornate armor decorated with reliefs, including a central face and small mythological scenes. A heavy cloak drapes over the left shoulder and arm, adding a sense of movement to the otherwise rigid pose. The right arm is raised, holding a …

GettyImages-2251194610webready-4cb3bc4-e1771851284517.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

10 children and 12,000 pieces of art: the remarkable life of Lady Charlotte Schreiber
type: item
date: 2026-02-20T15:30:55.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Amazing lives
description: She was a headstrong scholar who contributed hugely to the study of medieval literature and challenged the societal norms of the 19th century. So why isn’t she better known? Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth traces the adventures of an unsung heroine
encoded: While hunting for antiques in the Netherlands in the 1880s, the esteemed art dealer Joseph Joel Duveen received a tip-off that some “wonderful pieces of china” had come up for sale in a remote village. Getting there would involve a tediously long journey but, undeterred, Duveen set out. Several hours later, however, he spotted a carriage speeding past in the opposite direction, and was able to make out its passenger. Recognising the face of his great rival, Duveen promptly turned around, empty-handed, ruefully realising that she had beaten him to the village and “snatched the prize”. The victor on this occasion was Lady Charlotte Schreiber. Surprisingly, given her long life – she was 82 when she died, in 1895 – which included two marriages, 10 children, scandalous affairs and a celebrated translation of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, Lady Charlotte remains relatively unknown today. Often erroneously dismissed as a mere magpie obsessed with trinkets, for decades her second husband and sons were credited for accumulating her great collection. Yet, shortly before her death, she donated a trove of some 5,000 pieces to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and the British Museum. Defiance and scandal Charlotte endured a difficult childhood. Born Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie in 1812, she lost her father, the 9th Earl of Lindsey, when she was only six years old. Her mother remarried, and her new stepfather, the Reverend Peter Pegus, turned out to be a violent alcoholic; he once drank a whole mug of lamp oil, mistaking it for beer. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain At the age of 10, Charlotte started keeping a diary, in which she wrote almost every day until she lost her eyesight in her late seventies. A true polymath, she gave herself “a man’s education”, studying history and literature, and learning Arabic and Farsi (Persian) as well as Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and even Hebrew. She dedicated hours to her “oriental …

CharlotteSchreiber-HR-no-flagwebready-79a098d-e1771491873253.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

How to be a Victorian
type: item
date: 2026-02-20T08:00:58.000Z
creator: Isabel King
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: Jamie Camplin explores what it meant to be Victorian, charting the achievements and challenges of this period of seismic change
encoded: The Victorian period was a time of great economic, cultural and technological change. But what was it like to actually live through it? Speaking to Isabel King, author Jamie Camplin – whose latest book is Being Victorian – charts the highs and lows of the era, from the lasting legacy of the 1851 Great Exhibition to what today's society can learn from the 19th century. To find out more about the significant changes that took place in the Victorian period, don't miss our HistoryExtra Academy course on Victorian Britain, with historian Ruth Goodman. Go beyond the podcast.

Jamie-Camplin-Being-Victorian-WL-AN-f72bbcc.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s
type: item
date: 2026-02-16T15:30:41.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Fascism
subject: Historical people
subject: Wartime Britain
description: Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Britons chose a different, more moderate, path. Alwyn Turner explores why the posturing and rants of would-be dictators largely fell on deaf ears between the wars
encoded: “Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”. Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year. In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It…

InterwarLEADwebready-702c5f5-e1771233101174.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

London 1908 was the weirdest Winter Olympics in history – and here's why
type: item
date: 2026-02-15T15:30:16.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Football
subject: Historical events
subject: Olympics
description: Boxing and football? In a Winter Olympics? In October? Held in 1908, the first-ever winter games was an experimental affair. But, writes Martin Polley, it was one that sowed the seeds for future – and snowier – competitions
encoded: “Outside dirty, slushy streets, a melancholy drizzle and a muggy, uncomfortable atmosphere suggestive of nothing more remote than the crisp, keen, invigorating air that is associated in everyone’s mind with the sport of skating.” This editorial, published in Sporting Life, was far from a sparkling endorsement of the first-ever Olympic skating event. But then this was far from a typical Olympics. In fact, the inaugural Winter Olympics, held in London in 1908, would be unrecognisable to modern eyes familiar with today’s four-yearly snow-and-ice spectacle. Yet it forged the way for what’s now become a major fixture on the international sports scene, the latest iteration of which – Milano Cortina 2026 – is being staged across Lombardy and north-eastern Italy this February. The figure-skating event introduced in such dismal terms by Sporting Life was held in the Prince’s Club, Knightsbridge, and was part of a larger ‘winter’ programme staged in Britain as part of the fourth modern Olympic Games. Those games would witness a number of innovations, some of which today sound odd or even faintly ridiculous – motorboat racing or bicycle polo, for example. Other experiments stuck, though. The 1908 games saw the concept of national teams first formally introduced, while the distance for the Marathon that the London organisers used went on to become the standard for the race. And like these other innovations, the winter programme left a long-lasting legacy. Though it was another 16 years before Olympic organisers staged a full Winter Olympics, it was the British Olympic Council (BOC) that first put an ice-based sport on the programme, and which first organised an event called the Olympic Winter Games. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1236365554webready-ddcdecb-e1770899425786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A postcard depicting a large white, circular stadium in London. It is surrounded by free spaces and in the backgrou…

GettyImages-530863094webready-5912627-e1770998361640.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe
type: item
date: 2026-02-11T15:20:48.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Islam
description: Tharik Hussain speaks to Danny Bird about the long but often overlooked and distorted history of Muslims in Europe – and the enduring resistance to its reappraisal
encoded: Danny Bird: You open your book by recounting a chance visit to an old mosque in Cyprus. What was so significant about that moment? Tharik Hussain: Nothing changed for me on the day itself, because I knew very little about Islam’s history in Europe at that time. On a long, cheap layover in Larnaca – a place I’d never heard of – I was simply looking for a way to pass the time with a toddler in tow. I’d found a brief reference to a nearby mosque, and decided to visit. At the time (2003), I was preparing to make hijrah – to leave Britain, because I felt that I no longer belonged. My education had led me to believe that there was no meaningful Muslim history in Europe. So when we arrived at this neglected Ottoman-era mosque at the Hala Sultan Tekke, I had no framework for understanding it. The elderly guide didn’t speak English, and neither of us knew what we were looking at. What unsettled me was a tomb inside the mosque, which clashed with the theological outlook my wife and I held at the time. We left, dismissing the place, though the guide handed us a small booklet as we went. Two years later, while working as an English language teacher in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I rediscovered the booklet. To my shock, it claimed that the tomb belonged to a relative of the Prophet Muhammad – his maternal aunt, Umm Harâm. That completely overturned my belief that Europe had no real Islamic history, let alone connections reaching back to the Prophet’s own family. When did Islam first come to Europe? If we look at the very beginnings of Muslim presence in Europe, it’s striking how quickly it arrived. Within 20 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in AD 632, Muslims were present in places such as Cyprus and, later, Sicily, establishing themselves far more quickly than Christian or Jewish communities had done in the continent. Some of these early arrivals, including members of the Prophet’s family, were then buried in Europe, their tombs becoming sites of ziyara (pilgrimage), holding gre…

Tharik-Hussain-14webready-b93b76c-e1770822628745.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

Who is the most overrated person in history? 9 experts reveal their choices
type: item
date: 2026-02-09T15:30:00.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: British queens
subject: Debate
subject: Historical people
subject: Medieval kings and queens
subject: Roman rulers
subject: Viking life and culture
description: In the first of a new monthly series, we asked an expert team of historians to tackle one of the big questions about the past
encoded: Homer Composite figment of imaginations The writer credited with composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, and often regarded as one of the most important authors of all time, is to my mind the most overrated historical figure. That’s mostly because it’s likely that there was no one person called Homer. Careful study of those works, as well as other surviving epic fragments, has shown that they weren’t written at a single time by one person. Instead, it is likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed over generations by poetry performers known as rhapsodes. Each of these improved on the work of their predecessors, curating these epics and honing them to a point of perfection. From that time, probably around 700 BC, these works started to be transmitted in a more stable format. By around 550–500 BC, they were written down for the first time. By then, the belief was circulating that their genesis lay with one particular poet, Homer – not least because the idea of a single, genius author is simpler and more attractive than a slow process of evolution involving hundreds. A whole narrative was woven about the likely fictitious Homer: that he lived on Chios, that he was blind, even that he may have had some divine parentage. In fact, the notional Homer became so popular that later rhapsodes, doing performances of these now ‘finished’, stable poems, liked to claim themselves as ‘sons of Homer’ to give themselves more gravitas and fame. Ancient historians even wrote biographies of Homer as a historical figure, and busts were created of him. Yet, as a single man, he probably never existed at all. Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick Charles Dickens Verbose Victorian who distorted views of his era At the risk of being tarred and feathered next time I show my face at a Victorian history conference, I’d have to say that Dickens is overrated. It’s not that I dislike his work. Critics usually object to his long-winded prose, or baulk…

Ask-the-expertsoverrated-balloons-BBC-Hist-Kate-Hazell-TRANSPARENT-V2webready-70bef4c-e1770633924878.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy
type: item
date: 2026-02-02T15:30:45.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: British queens
subject: Georgian
subject: Historical people
subject: Royal children
subject: Royal weddings
subject: The royal family
description: At a time when the royal family is under significant strain, historians shine a spotlight on some of the biggest crises to have enveloped the British monarchy over the past three centuries
encoded: The prince, the brothel and a culture war Katie Hindmarch-Watson describes a sex scandal that consumed Queen Victoria’s grandson On 7 July 1889, a policeman arrested a sometime telegraph boy, Henry Newlove, at his mother’s house in Camden Town. Newlove had been recruiting younger telegraph boys at London’s Central Telegraph Office to provide sexual services for affluent male clients at a brothel on Cleveland Street. Defiant, Newlove said that he thought it “very hard that I should get into trouble while men in high position are allowed to walk around free… Why, Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house at Cleveland Street; so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois.” Within months, Newlove was in prison and Somerset was in exile. Yet Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, triumphed in a libel suit that exonerated him from any “gross indecency”, and Colonel Jervois received no further mention in police records or the press. However, another man in high position became the focus of speculation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL11686324webready-dfc0737-e1770036564257.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A newspaper depicting several scenes of men in top hats and young boys standing in the street" title="The Cleveland Street Scandal, as reported in The Illustrated Police News on 25 January 1890. The affair – which embroiled Prince Albert Victor – “evolved into a morality tale about rich men’s predatory vices” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> We still don’t really know why Prince Albert Victor – or ‘Eddy’, grandson of Queen Victoria and oldest son of the Prince of Wales – became linked to the story. Arthur Somerset had been his father’s equerry, but there is no evidence that the two men associated with one another, and no proof has emerged one way or another about Eddy’s propensity for sex with teenage telegraph boys. The Cleveland Street Scandal evolved from Newlove’s revelations into a morality tale about rich men’s pred…

Royal-scandals-2-Decemberwebready-670ae71-e1770036293461.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000